LONGEVITY with Nathalie Niddam

#418: The Science of NAD+: Why Precursors & IVs Fail Without This Step With Courtney Van Bussum

82 min
Mar 6, 2026about 1 month ago
Listen to Episode
Summary

Courtney Van Bussum breaks down NAD+ metabolism as a complex ecosystem rather than a simple molecule to supplement, explaining how most people misunderstand NAD by ignoring NADH balance, enzyme degradation (CD38, NNMT), and the salvage pathway. The episode reveals why NAD precursors and IVs often fail without addressing downstream metabolic support, particularly through blocking NNMT with 1-MNA and managing inflammation.

Insights
  • NAD is not depleted with age—rather, more enzymes consume it; the real problem is 'holes in the bucket' from inflammation, stress, and degradative enzymes like CD38 and NNMT, not insufficient production
  • The NAD+/NADH ratio differs across cellular compartments (serum vs. cytoplasm vs. mitochondria), making serum-only NAD testing largely useless for understanding true cellular energy status
  • Oral NAD precursors (NMN, NR) don't directly enter cells as-is; they're broken down and rebuilt, making the marketing hype around 'which precursor is best' misleading without addressing salvage pathway support
  • NNMT enzyme consumes nicotinamide and steals methyl groups, depleting SAM (the universal methyl donor) and creating homocysteine inflammation—a hidden cost of NAD supplementation that requires 1-MNA co-support
  • Sleep and resistance exercise are the highest-ROI NAD preservation strategies because they regulate NAMPT (a clock-controlled salvage enzyme), making lifestyle optimization foundational before supplementation
Trends
Shift from 'biohacking' to 'sustainable lifestyle medicine' integrating innovation with community, nervous system regulation, and basic wellness practicesPost-COVID medicine emerging as a distinct field requiring mitochondrial repair strategies, with NAD metabolism central to long-COVID recovery protocolsRedox balance and electron transport chain optimization becoming mainstream longevity focus, moving beyond single-molecule supplementation to ecosystem thinkingAI-assisted literature filtering gaining adoption in longevity research to cut through hype, with practitioners using prompted AI to identify peer-reviewed evidence vs. marketing claimsMetabolic flexibility restoration (exogenous ketones, NAD cycling) gaining traction as alternative to continuous supplementation, emphasizing variation and resilienceIntracellular NAD+/NADH ratio testing emerging from European research labs as next-generation biomarker, replacing crude serum-level measurements1-MNA (one-methyl nicotinamide) moving from obscure urine biomarker to clinical tool for NNMT regulation and methylation support in NAD protocolsEndothelial function and microvascular health recognized as underappreciated benefits of NAD ecosystem support, particularly via nitric oxide signalingHomocysteine re-emerging as key NAD metabolism marker, with elevated levels indicating NNMT upregulation and need for methylation supportKetone esters (free-floating BHB + 1,3-butanediol) gaining market traction over ketone salts due to improved bioavailability and taste profile
Topics
NAD+ and NADH balance in cellular energy productionSalvage pathway enzyme regulation (NAMPT, NNMT, CD38)NAD precursors (NMN, NR, nicotinamide) bioavailability and conversionMethylation depletion from NNMT upregulationHomocysteine as NAD metabolism biomarker1-MNA (one-methyl nicotinamide) as NNMT inhibitorNAD IV infusions vs. oral precursors efficacyCircadian regulation of NAD salvage enzymesRedox balance and reactive oxygen species managementExogenous ketones and metabolic flexibilityPost-COVID mitochondrial dysfunction recoverySleep and exercise as NAD preservation strategiesIntracellular NAD+/NADH ratio testingSenescent cell energy consumptionPolyphenols (apigenin) for CD38 inhibition
Companies
Longevity Launch Labs
Company co-founded by Courtney Van Bussum to commercialize longevity science innovations, including 1-MNA and ketone ...
Qualia Life
Supplement brand providing creatine plus formulation; sponsor offering 50% off plus 15% additional discount via code
Level Up Health
Supplement company offering Complete Liver Complex for detox pathway support; sponsor with 20% discount code NAT
Just Thrive Health
Probiotic and digestive health company offering gut essentials bundle; sponsor with 20% discount code NOT20
People
Courtney Van Bussum
Biomedical engineer and longevity entrepreneur; expert on NAD metabolism, NNMT regulation, and cellular energy pathways
Nathalie Niddam
Host of Longevity podcast; nutritionist and epigenetic coach; interviewer and co-discussant on NAD science
Quotes
"ATP is the money that the body spends and NAD is the banking system right? It's not catching in NAD and NADH and that's what allows your body to use the the cash of your glucose and your ketones"
Courtney Van Bussum~25:00
"We think oh okay I have less NAD I need to pour more in and we use this bucket analogy a lot right here's my bucket of NAD it's less let me fill it up but we've totally forgotten to plug all the holes in the bottom of the bucket"
Courtney Van Bussum~30:00
"The thing that I changed my mind most on is that we just need to support ourselves and our systems in the way that they were already designed"
Courtney Van Bussum~15:00
"If you're going to support your NAD system with precursors or with infusions make sure that you are also supporting the downstream metabolites by blocking the bad guys"
Courtney Van Bussum~65:00
"Sleep and exercise are the most potent drugs you can take"
Courtney Van Bussum~85:00
Full Transcript
Welcome to Longevity. I'm your host, Natalie Nidom. I'm a nutritionist, a human potential and epigenetic coach, and I created this podcast to bring you the latest ways to take control of your health and longevity. We cover it all from new technology and ancestral health practices, to personalized interventions, and a very special interest of mine, peptides and bio-regulators. Enjoy the show. Hi, welcome back. I'm Natalie Nidom, your host. NAD is everywhere right now, literally all the rage. But most people are only hearing half the story, and I think we all need to hear the full story. This is important. Today I'm sitting down with Courtney Von Bussum to break down the real cellular science, from the salvage pathways to inflammation, stress, and the hidden factors accelerating energy decline. Whether you're using NAD precursors, NADIVs, sub-QNAD, transdermal NAD, this episode adds the nuance. You didn't even know you needed, and I'm telling you guys, we all need it. So there are going to be some special offers for you about a couple of the products we talk about in the episode. If you're interested, they will be in the show notes. But again, you know what, I'm going to keep saying this before the podcast. Before you go shopping, please check out the episode, learn about the topic, and then see if this is something that you need to pay attention to. Next up, we're going to thank a couple of our sponsors who make the podcast possible, and then we're diving in. I want to talk about strength, not just lifting heavier, but feeling capable in your body. For many women, especially in parry menopause and beyond, we tend to notice fatigue first. Workouts might feel harder, recovery takes longer, and mental sharpness starts to decline. One of the most important supplements a woman over 40 can take may surprise you. It's your creatine. Our bodies make it, but we make less with age. 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Courtney Van Bussen, welcome to the show. It is a pleasure to finally have you here today. Yeah, hi, Matt. Thank you for having me. It's super excited to join and talk cellular pathways and all things, and 80 and beyond. And 80. Very controversial topic these days, and very hot. But before we dive into the science and all the things, I want to talk a little bit about you because you've kind of come onto the scene over the last, what is the last couple of years, really, right? But you grew up in a family that is all about this stuff. You grew up surrounded by healthcare and this really interesting combination of healthcare and entrepreneurship. So what's the earliest memory you have of that world, kind of, of that inkling of you thinking, oh, maybe I'm going to go into this myself. Yeah, that's a good question. I actually have it. No one's fully asked me the origin story. So yeah, as you alluded to, I, my mom's a doctor in this space, and she got into longevity medicine 20 years ago and started a clinic with my dad. So the entrepreneurship and medical blend, and I sat right into the middle of that. But I knew I never wanted to be a doctor because I watched that, and I didn't want anything to do with that. But I liked science. So that's where I studied biomedical engineering. And that was my, my baseline for it. But then kind of got into the business side of it and studied a lot of entrepreneurship startups, worked with startups, joined startups, and then I did something completely different and worked marketing at FinTech for a while as like my coming of age job. Nice. But I really did, as you alluded to, I really seeped into my subconscious in a lot of ways. You know, I remember like in high school, my mom telling me about the dangers of birth control pills, right? And at that time, everyone I knew was getting on birth control pills, a man which we did. And I share this story in just even though it's kind of psychotic. But when I somehow, you know, as a mother does, she found out like I was thinking about trying to get on birth control. And she printed out a bunch of research studies. I'm not my friend. I know your mother. And I can see that. You're just going to get on your pillow. What do I do with this? But I was scared enough that I didn't follow through with that time. So I think you know, it's kind of always been something I knew and it was really crazy to try to live in that world but have traditional medicine being talked about all around me. And then now and the less. So I did something else for a while and then COVID brought me back to Colorado. And that's really when I started to get involved more deeply in longevity business and working with longevity clinic. And then we started the second company, longevity launch labs as the way to do the business side of what we had learned. So the nice pairing to really get my feet in the operations, but then also start to build some of these broader business initiatives. Yeah. Well, you know, and it's interesting how as a young comparatively young person, you've kind of jumped into this longevity space. Like when people ask me, why'd you go into longevity? I'm like, well, dude, I'm old. Of course, I'm going to get into longevity. But you know, young people are notorious. More youthful people are notorious for never believing they're going to get old. And I feel like there's there's a new awareness around longevity that people need to start young. For best results, you want to start as young as possible to thinking and orienting yourself in this space. I grew up around trying to understand preventative medicine, even when you're being told you don't need, you know, you're young, you're fine. But I'm not that, yeah. I mean, prevention starts when you're healthy, right? So I kind of luckily started to build a lot of those mindsets early. So it's been fun to watch like my friends and people starting now just to hit their 30s and their 40s asking me all these questions that I've been talking about for a long time. What really pushed you towards solving age-related problems instead of something else? Like when did you know, like you clearly made a decision? And we're going to talk about some of the, you know, some of the molecules, some of the pathways that you dive into, dove into and came out the other side with new solutions to. When was that, did you, was there an intellectual point? I mean, it's a little cliche, but I think COVID was that it forced me home and it forced me back into this mindset of health much more deeply. And, you know, at that time, right, we're starting to learn about cellular pathways that I had already kind of been hearing about. So a lot of my history of biomedical engineering and learning biology and chemistry and all of this actually being talked about in the mainstream. And then I got involved in the clinic, started to do operations and all of a sudden I'm like, oh, I really like this blend of the science and the operations and I'm really good at it. So I started to go down that path. So I don't know if it was so much like I was like, this is now my future, but it was, I started to see that there was this need and my skills that really matched it. You know, it's funny, though, the world has now oriented to before COVID, not for now. It's pretty wild. And do you think that COVID changed? Like, I feel like COVID was a bit of a, it's a blip and it changed our trajectory in many ways from a health perspective. Like we now have to take that the presence of what's got left behind. And we have to take it into account and almost everything that we do. Yeah, I mean, it's a little scary, but I think and what, you know, if you take a more optimistic mindset, I think we will propel things forward way faster than we would have otherwise because to exactly that, I mean, a post-COVID world is real. We see way more, you know, health problems as a result of the spike protein, COVID, COVID vaccine, all of it. I was just talking to somebody at A4M who was working on that and they were saying, you know, even if you got COVID once, they can still test for the spike protein in your blood, right? It's still causing mayhem. So we have to figure out, you know, how to mitigate it. Yeah, what to do. Yeah, we're seeing what we do about it. Yeah. And that's for like being in the clinic. I saw those patients, right? We were, we were one of the first clinics that kind of got known as a long COVID clinic. Just being in, we looked at cellular pathways. And that's what happens. It kills your mitochondria. And so how do you heal that? So yeah, it's a post-COVID world and we have to learn to live in it. For sure. And it is interesting. I mean, this off topic for our podcast today, but it is interesting to me how understanding the people who have the obvious lasting effects and yet other people were not, which in and of itself will force us, as well force the medical industry to really start to consider what leaves one person susceptible and another one more resilient. And it doesn't mean the resilient person doesn't still have maybe some built-in weaknesses that they didn't have before. But it'll, it'll, to your point, I think it's going to push us. It's going to push the medical industry to really take a harder look at these things. I think it also pushes us, you know, we've talked about preventative medicine a lot. I think now I'm going to coin this time, but like resilient medicine because resilience is the great word. How do you build resilience? Because everything is a toxic world. Everything is trying to hurt your ability to heal and and survive. So how do you be resilient to get into that? Looking back, what did you once believe about aging or metabolic health that you now realize was completely wrong? Or what have you changed your mind on? Is there anything? Yeah, I think, you know, fundamentally, I think what I would have to say, the thing that I changed my mind most on, especially as I've gotten deeper into cellular medicine, is that we just need to support ourselves and our systems in the way that they were already designed. I think a lot of like longevity and biohacking has been, how do we, how do we fix this? How do we, you know, force us in a certain direction, improve this and by taking a bunch of net new and more you look at how intuitive our cells are and our systems are, you learn actually let me just nudge and let me just heal and then things will work naturally. So I think a lot of times we cause more problems by trying to, you know, throw everything in the kitchen sink at at fixing it versus maybe we could be a little more intelligent in this little tiny stuff that we take. Yeah, I think that that's a perfect segue into our conversation because NAD is at the center of this people thinking if some is good more is better and how do I push this and how do I optimize my NAD? How do I get more NAD? So for people who know the, you know, they've heard about NAD but they don't really understand the biochemistry. First of all, why should every longevity enthusiast really care about NAD in any way? Yeah, so I mean NAD has gotten kind of some hype for good reason, right? NAD is found in every single one of our cells. So therefore that tells us it's pretty fundamental to how life works and life functions. So just to define it, you know, NAD stands for nicotinamide at an idinucleotide but we just know it as NAD and it's a colon enzyme and so what that means is that it's actually a molecule that allows our enzymes to function and to catalyze different processes of life. And what's so powerful about NAD and why I do say it's kind of worth the hype is that it's this really interesting redox molecule and redox if we remember from way back in, you know, early bio is the ability to go from reduction and oxidation and this is this flipping back and forth that causes energy to move along the electron transporting and that's what creates ATP, right? And so NAD is actually the the category for NADH and NAD plus. So it's two-sided with the same coin and that's important because that NAD plus, right, is the oxidized form and it means it's missing an electron so it has this positive charge that allows electron transport to then happen and that is what that movement of electrons is critical to how ourselves make ATP which is how ourselves make energy to do literally everything. So that's why you should care about NAD and I think that we've started to understand it has this really important role in cellular energy but also in cellular repair that part doesn't get done as much that you need NAD to repair, you know, your DNA through your parts and your CER2 ends NADH and so it's this really critical energy molecule your system relies on for functioning. That's a great explanation and I love that you bring up NADH because I think it's the other half that never that really doesn't get talked about and I think that where we get in trouble is by ignoring the NADH piece we we we we lack understanding and balance in the fact that there needs to be balance between NAD and NADH and the cell is desperate to hang on to that balance and I think that might be where there may be trouble brewing in this obsession for bringing more NAD into the system. 100 percent I mean there like I said there are two sides of the same coin and that ratio is really important and that ratio actually is different in the serum than it is in the cytoplasm than it is inside the mitochondria. So ourselves have different levels of NAD plus than NADH and that's why just this idea of like let me measure my NAD plus levels in the serum is kind of useless in a lot of ways because it's not giving you that inside scoop of what's the balance and NAD for critical like you said it's it's kind of that first molecule that helps you know start electron transport and kicking those electrons down and helping the I like this analogy that check gave me that I've been using a lot which is like ATP is the money that the body spends and NAD is the banking system right? It's not catching in NAD and NADH and that's what allows your body to use the the cash of your glucose and your ketones and your your fuel sources. That's a good analogy. I love a good analogy. I love a good analogy and that's and that's something that people can really understand right? So let's talk about what happens to NAD as we age. So a lot of people talk about NAD just naturally goes down as we age which means we have less cellular energy and to your point less cellular energy means nothing works as well as it should whether it's repair of DNA whether it's metabolizing the nutrients that you eat like nothing in the body is going to happen if it doesn't have the energy if the cells don't have the energy that they need. So but from your scientific and engineering perspective and I have to say that I love engineers in this space because people the engineers in this space and sometimes they have almost no medical background but they there's such a systems mindset that they're able to break everything down and they always when I was coaching they were the best clients because everything was on a spreadsheet you know so I could go through the spreadsheet and say okay get rid of this this this this we're gonna add that you know like it just I love the engineering if I come back I want to be an engineer but but going back to the question from your scientific and engineering perspective why is that an oversimplification what's actually happening in the cells yeah when we see that NAD decline yeah well quickly I appreciate the engineering mindset because I like genuinely enjoy talking cellular pathways and I think probably that's weird for most people not in our space as much but it's because it makes sense to an engineer like it's actually like very stepwise right so to lead into that so NAD fits into that and it's kind of why I've gotten to know these pathways so well but this idea that we make less than NAD as we age is it's very much a misconception we definitely you know when you look at the NAD available to us as we age that number may be less and I think that's where this idea has come from and it's really not because ourselves forgot how to make NAD we have this really smart system of NAD recycling right called the Salad in the Hacley but it's that we have more things consuming and degrading our NAD and that's kind of the crux of the of the misconception so we think oh okay I have less NAD I need to pour more in and we use this bucket analogy a lot right here's my bucket of NAD it's less let me fill it up but we've totally forgotten to plug all the holes in the bottom of the bucket which are the degraded of enzymes and the things that are eating and consuming your NAD and what are those things well as we get older there's more of these drainage um inflammatory drainage systems right and so that could be stressed that could be inflammation that could be illness um but there's these enzymes like one of them's called CD38 one's called NNMT we can talk about those a little bit more but they're gonna consume up both the fuel that we need to make NAD and also the NAD itself and you have more systems than fighting for that things like senescent zombie cells or fat cells cancer cells those things also want energy just as much as your sir two ins or your parts are asking for it I love that you bring up the NNMT and CD38 now CD38 has come up and so there are definitely ways to to manage CD38 which we'll talk about in a minute there's also is there also an issue with the salvage pathway so there is I mean in the intelligence of the body and the intelligences of the cell the cool thing about the body is it's not going to use a resource and then throw it away particularly particularly not when it comes to something as critical of NAD so we have this recycling going on but my understanding is that that salvage pathway starts to be compromised in some way you can you are you able to talk a little bit about what is that what the stressors and all the stuff is doing or are there specific things that are compromising that salvage pathway yeah so let me just quickly define so the salvage pathway it primarily functions on nicotinamide and that's the the thing so it like you said our system doesn't really waste stuff so NAD an intracellular NAD ultimately ends up back as nicotinamide and that nicotinamide turns back into NAD and so I'll talk briefly on the precursors the precursors the way they work is they actually are extracellular and then they have to get converted down into NAD plus and then that recycles into nicotinamide and that continues so when you're looking at the salvage pathway the the two areas that you're worried about are that NAD out that NAD plus molecule that gets put out and then the nicotinamide molecule which is sort of a fuel for that NAD plus so NNMT that enzyme that I just mentioned it's actually degrading nicotinamide and it loves to steal methyl groups to take to take nicotinamide and steal methyl groups and that converts into homocysteine so you're actually creating this inflammation reaction from that side of it CD38 is degrading actually chewing up your NAD output right so when I think of it there's actually two buckets nicotinamide NAD and these enzymes are consuming either the fuel for NAD or the NAD itself that's where inside of that salvage pathway that becomes really important okay um our way all doing guys are you hanging on you need you need a paper and a pen for this episode I should have said this at the beginning I'll say it in the intro so you mentioned precursors do you want to talk about the precursors you're referring to I'm assuming you're talking about NR NMN and the big there's more fur feathers and blood all over the world about people screaming about which one's better yes um so I also if I'm saying like I think there's a time and a place for precursors um specifically though what people lose sight of is that a lot of the input is not actually what's going into the cell right oral NMN or oral NR is not going to turn directly into NAD inside the cell um so we're missing that usability piece so I when I look at it you know the difference between the two so NMN can't officially enter the cells it's broken down into NR and then NR goes into the cell and is rebuilt as NMN and that that's converted to NAD so you actually have this like multi-step process so NMN has to go into NR before it turns into intercellular and what's all the big deal with NMN like why is everybody screaming about NMN being so important because it's a precursor the why not just take NR that that would be my my suggestion would actually just be to take nicotine of mine that's going to be your cheapest one and that's the the vitamin that's just to be three is that bit be three vitamin yeah so it's it's the most available and it's the most easily taken into the cell to turn into NAD whereas NR you still have to convert it to can get into NAD that's why like truly this misconception of these precursors are not just fueled directly for NAD they have to go through some steps in the process and that's even like IV NAD is even more of that right if the however it's going to ask that because the NAD molecule is large right but we know it does not get into the cell as is so what happens to that NAD when we get an NAD IV it has to get broken down right the same way down to nicotine of mine basically exactly so it's getting broken down all the way into the metabolites to then enter the cell and then turn into intercellular NAD so it's not it's the NAD you're taking from an infusion is not the NAD that's getting into the cell and so do you have any any any theories about what that NAD like I've heard theories that the what the NAD is doing is acting as an extracellular signaling molecule that's providing some degree of benefits but it's not what people think it is yeah I think you you do get this sort of flush of you know an NAD a deep NAD replenish and so yeah a place that I say infusions make this makes sense to me is when you're really trying to restore right you and I are both having a pool if you're we get really sick then maybe you need to restore NAD levels fully to kind of help you're not going to get that same you know influx from a precursor that you would from a IV or like post a marathon something that really delights your energy system but the thing that I think partly why the whole NAD infusion thing has gotten really talked about is people are like I feel good it's funny I was literally just at the wedding on Saturday and the groom who's my friend he's like comes up to me he goes oh my gosh someone did this mad infusion for me I don't know what that is but I feel great like do you know what that is? not you're fine it's fascinating how people will allow people to stick needles in their arm and and don't know what they're doing I know so you know what that is yeah I do actually I do but people do get this like feel good and I think honestly a little bit of that is a fight or flight because you've thrown redox off right and you're getting this this kind of overwhelm of the of the system that your body turns a little bit into adrenaline if anything right right right well you also feel pretty crummy when you're getting the NAD infusion if you're getting a high dose an ad infusion we will feel bad and there's nothing better for feeling good than feeling bad right right yeah I always figured it's contra it's like a form of contrast therapy only different um but but to that I mean I'll do an ad infusion a couple of times a year as a replenishment but in between I'm a person who really believes in in the pre- in providing precursors where there's a new trend right now or I don't know how new it is but there's a trend right now where people are doing daily subcutaneous NAD and I feel that now we're starting to cross the line in potentially throwing that balance off right I think that's what people are missing right if I am not supporting the downstream cellular system then if I just start putting new inputs into that system I don't know what's going to happen and that's where like these if I have inflammation and I have all of these cells that are also energy hungry I could potentially be fueling some of that senescence in essence because of all of this NAD I'm putting in so to my point there's replenishment because the world is hard and against us but I know people who are doing NAD infusions you know every every month plus there's a few plus their precursors and now what have we done to redox and so what what's the downside here what what can happen and I feel like that this is where cd38 to some degree but really nmnt come into the conversation and this is this is the piece you mentioned them earlier I feel like this is the piece that a lot of people don't either it's not on their radar they're not fully grasping how important it is like how did these how did these enzymes shape our NAD metabolism and why are they critical and we're talking about energy immunity which are the core of healthy aging so let's talk a little bit what okay what's the downside and let's talk about this nmnt because that's the one I think cd38 we get it's an enzyme that gets up regulated we need to suppress it we can talk about how that works in a minute but the nmnt conversation is different and I'd love you to take us on that little journey yes yeah so it's it's much more involved than I think people understand right that's sort of the moral of the story so when you throw all these precursors in for example now you've got all of this nicotinamide because that's the salvage pathways kicking nicotinamide and it has to go somewhere and so our body has a system and an enzyme to clear that excess nicotinamide called nmnt nicotinamide and methyl transferase and that m is important because that methyl piece means it's involved in methylation and so you're actually the way that we're clearing this excess nicotinamide is by using up methyl donors so that's where the the nmnt actually can steal a methyl group from fanny right or universal methyl donor which is what you need for methylation for things like folate and b12 and coline or dna repair neurotransmitters right I mean we know I told you for a more yeah the host of things that methylation is important for so when I steal a methyl group to help clear out this nicotinamide then you're hurting your innate methylation processes so someone who's a poor methylated are already right your comt people your mt and tf are people that's going to be extra important because they're already struggling with this and now I've stolen methyl groups from this methyl donor and then the the other side of that cycle is it's then creating acedenticillal homocysteine so now you've created a homocysteine which you need a little bit of but as you've put too much homocysteine in it's a direct inflammatory marker and so you're actually feeding inflammation by not regulating this pathway correctly within an mt and depleting methyl groups which have to your point a lot of people have impaired methylation and the last thing they need is to lose to be depleting their methyl groups so should people so when people are using so should people be supporting methylation at the same time as they're using these supplements like at some level if you're taking an nad supplement do you need to be supporting like providing methyl groups and what would that look like to you yes I think that that methylation story is an untold story of nad so if you're doing if you're going to do nad or infusions or precursors making sure that you're supporting the methylation side as well and then you know the supplement that I know of that works directly on this is called one mna and the reason one mna is involved is because it's the body self regulating tool to blunt and block n and mt so n and mt up raises one mna right up raises tones down in mt but we can't keep up with that naturally so when we over stimulate n and mt then having supplemental one mna to help block n and mt and then now you're supporting that methylation properly right because you're no longer depleting it yeah yeah so you can actually block n and mt with one mna just like you can block cd 38 with some of these polyphenols like apogenin and others that really sort of go in place of where that ends I'm trying to calculate interesting is that you buy know that when I do my when when I get my nad ivs we have methyl support methylation like there's in the iv ordered in a separate iv bag there's going to be methylation support right and that's mean that means they know a little bit more about what they're doing they know what they're doing i've i've figured out a long time ago i you know kind of avoid the the classic kind of run of the mill iv lounge and tend to go to people who have studied pathways and have a deep understanding of what they're doing well and it's interesting to kind of on the same thing right methylation and neurotransmitters so when people do an iv sometimes when they do say afterwards that they feel this euphoric you know sentiment it's actually in part because you're slowing down the clearance right you're slowing down the methylation of those neurotransmitters because so now you've got these you know dopamine nurgic things in your brain for longer then you're going to feel that way so it's actually because of the methylation all sometimes that you're getting that feeling and it's a temporary state of affairs like let's get there so i think it's interesting what you mentioned about the nade ivs how really is as a pulse it can help to you know as a once in a blue moon like once in a while and in my case it's twice a year pulse you know and i'm in my 60s so i feel like in at my stage of life it's appropriate for me every once in a while to kind of overfill the bucket in a in a smart way to just to bring better balance to a system that might be falling out of balance it falls but it's almost like my banking system is falling behind a little bit so i'm repaying debt if you will yeah and that's where like i always you know the world is working against us and every year you've been older the world is working against you more and that's that is aging right and so i think when you are older or you have some illness that's working against you in a higher fashion you do need to replenish you do need to give yourself additional support 100 percent so you've described and you talked about a little bit but maybe go into it in a different way so you described the nade pathway really as an ecosystem not a linear pathway and i feel like people the way we think is linear we you know we we go oh it goes from this to this to this and yet it's an ecosystem so you want to maybe let's let's re because we i think we're going to end up talking again about cd 38 one and empty so maybe like like let's repaint that picture for people so they get a really real clarity over all the circular processes here just to kind of bring it back so i think one of the things you know to answer the question about ecosystem one of the total misconceptions is people think of nade as a molecule right like they're like nade is a thing it's a supplement it's an infusion it's a molecule no your spot on it's an ecosystem in a very complex one of that and so we talked about the salvage pathway but there's actually three pathways that you can get nade from right and salvage there's the noble pathway and then there's the price handler pathway and they all work differently and kind of take different inputs and so you can get nade from those first two from outside you what you ingest and then from the salvage pathway that's that recycling and so all these metabolites have a certain role in these pathways so the salvage then you create the nicotinamide nicotinamide can turn into nade nade plus then helps to catalyze electron transport the sort of subset of that is the methylation pathway so there's like a picture in my head where there's these two paths that come in that's from the outside in then you have this little circle of salvage that's the saving and the reusing then you have methylation which is monitored in part by nade and then you have ATP over here on the far side because that's what's that's the more linear part right where you're jumping down through these complexes to create it oversimplified but uh well but it's a good I have the exact same picture in my head the salvage pathway is a circle the only other thing I have in my head is cd 38 that kind of pops up grabs and steals yeah and then which again is mostly oversimplified guys but it's that's the right then you have like your ser two ends in your parts like fighting off your cd 38 right and sometimes they're successful and sometimes they're not but anyway but but that but I think that it's important to kind of repaint that picture so that people really get that there's more complexity here than just bringing an input in I think you know like in a world where there's so much hype in the longevity space there's so much contradictory information and I don't even know that the research is contradictory I just feel like people go in grab what they think they want and and really push that without always talking about the whole picture and then and then in order to make it accessible to people we there's a tendency to oversimplify narratives like how do you personally filter science from the noise like how do you how do you cut through that and do you have any advice for people on that because I think that's where it's just so hard for people I I feel for them yeah you know and frankly I even get caught in it sometimes so what what's your best suggestion for us yeah no I mean I talk you know I sit in a room with a lot of doctors with a lot of different opinions and so it's always how do you make sense of the chaos I'll I'll start first with the I think the things that people are starting to understand better which is you know look at who funded the study that's always like if there's a specific study that you're that you're trying to discern and just because a group funded it with a you know incentive I don't think that completely says the study is hogwash but just take it with the certain lens at that point right and then similarly like some of the study design things but that starts to get a little complicated yeah I think this is where GPT and AI has a really powerful role right I tell yeah I tell my AI when I act like an unbiased cellular medicine scientist don't tell me anything that's a lie don't extrapolate and like then if you give it all of these directions to be as unbiased as possible it can help you make sense of that right don't tell me don't tell me things I want to hear tell me what's the actual back-to-peer-reviewed scientific literature and so it's amazing that you have to create those prompts but it is more amazing that you can put in those prompts and then get the quality information you're looking for yeah exactly right but you have to be that's where like if I just put an AI and they tell me if this is legitimate I don't even trust that right because AI has got its own biases so I think that's a place and then the other thing that I've started to goes back to what I said at the very beginning the fundamental cellular biology hasn't really changed right and we have a lot of data about like how does electron transport work and how does this enzyme do this thing and so when you start to understand the cell mechanisms at place now you can intuitively ask yourself does this make sense right yeah like that's why I like the NAD conversation because it's okay now that I start to see that there's this balance and NAD and NADH and they're both important and all of a sudden I'm like wait then maybe it doesn't make sense to put a whole bunch of something into a system that requires balance if you've accepted bloat cravings and that post meal crash after reading is your new normal I'm challenging you to feel better and I'm giving you the cheat code the just thrive gut essentials bundle it pairs to clinically proven superstars just thrive probiotic and digestive bitters just thrive probiotic is the only probiotic clinically proven to arrive 100% alive in your gut for a difference you'll actually feel we're talking less bloat better energy and even clearer skin then there's digestive bitters it packs 12 science backterbs in one tasteless capsule that jumps starts your digestion and supports GLP1 production so cravings don't control you imagine that signaling your own endogenous GLP1 production together they'll transform the health of your gut so you can feel like your best self fast there's even a 100% money back guarantee so you have literally got nothing to lose for over a decade just thrive has been helping thousands of people take control of their health with science back solutions you can trust from their award-winning probiotic to their full line of gut immune and brain health supplements just thrive is ready to help you live your healthiest life take the just thrive feel better challenged today and save 20% off your first gut essentials bundle visit just thrive health calm forward slash not 20 and save 20% with promo code not 20 see the difference for yourself or get a full product refund no questions ask that's just thrive health calm forward slash not 20 code not 20 when did I make breakthrough for you when that it hit your radar because you know it's it's a it's a whole new player here not a lot of people don't know about it it's still pretty fringe we don't see it in too many places like I really found out about it from you last June when we ran into each other at that one conference so what first made you kind of sit up and go oh this is interesting yeah no I a great question so I think because of the clinic that I was at and the conversations I was being a part of we were talking about redox right like redox has become second nature in my vernacular and you can't talk about redox now talking about NAD and NADH and then we were at a conference where we heard the lecture mentioned one M&A as part of this NNMT NAD system and really in this light of like it could be a molecule that helps us block NNMT and support NAD and that had never really crossed you know through to the to the full language of NAD metabolism yet so when we started to go look for it that's when we found that it wasn't available in the states anywhere right and so followed the research well first we looked at the research and you're like well actually there's quite a bit of research on one M&A going back decades and why has no one heard about this and then you follow it to Europe and you find some of the original research out of this group in Eastern Europe and starting to look into that so it really was this very organic like we wanted it for our patients we followed the science we followed the research we couldn't you know and we had to work through some confusion like there always is and then we connected with the group out of Europe to really help bring it to the states and that's where you know that's inside of our business hat that's why we started this separate company because we want to keep the clinic and the business separate in a lot of ways the clinic is for clinical and research and patients and we don't want it to be tied to a bunch of you know financial incentives so I really am on the business incubation side I'll consult the clinic on operations but that's mainly at this point yeah well and so going back to when M&A it just seems to to solve a problem that we didn't have a solution for before in many ways and so there's emerging research on it and its roles in inflammation, vascular health, metabolic resilience so what's an insight from that literature that hasn't yet entered the mainstream conversations to think so if you look at the earliest research on one M&A a lot of it's actually tied to endothelial function and like micro vascular function and it's not totally clear I think it's still sort of is related to NAD but when you actually dig there's a lot of unrelated any unrelated to NAD effects of one M&A and this signaling of nitrogoxide is part of that and so yeah we're going to nitrogoxide today okay let's go um so I can see through a lot of the literature this endothelial enhancement so when you start talking about how do you improve fatigue it's not just because of NAD but you're also improving micro vascular chart and the it gets kind of deep into like cox pathway and nitrogoxid signaling and yada yada and I can't honestly speak at the level of those pathways as they can on the others but think that's something that we take for granted as well as it's not just an NAD boosting molecule it has these other completely unrelated effects in the system as well well you know what's interesting about that is I think that in the human body I don't think anybody gets to have one job exactly like if you look at any molecule in the body it never has only one job it's like there's never one pathway to get to an end there's redundancies there's other pathways there's backups there's things we don't even know about and so to to that end I think that one M&A starting to elucidate some of the other purposes and uses and reasons why it's important is is really it makes more sense right in many ways and then and do we do we make it do we make it does our body make yeah yeah there's our body make it like we we make a certain amount of one M&A at this point what we're doing is we're supple and do we need to supplement one M&A because of the NAD supplementation or is it also a molecule that gets depleted or is becoming more challenged or or maybe there's more demands on it as we age yeah no that's what we should talk about it's there's more demands on a molecule as we age instead of it being depleted I think in general the narrative needs to go that way right like that's really what's happening the completion is that more things are demanding it's time yeah yeah but oh yes question one and one M&A is naturally produced by the body inside of that NNMT cycle it's like the counterbalance to NNMT so when NNMT goes up when M&A goes up to block in NNMT and NNMT goes down when M&A goes down it's when that can't keep up right there's a lot of also rate regulation inside of ourselves you can only do things so fast right and so that's where we can't keep up with the amount of NNMT and so what we need is to supplement with one M&A to support that system that's interesting and so then the one M&A I mean originally it was discovered because it was just a urine biomarker like it was it was a proxy that we were looking at to understand B vitamins and other other things and then we realized it actually had all of these implicit benefits and that's when we started to go down the research pathway of it and then COVID actually also there was some studies that came out with one M&A supporting long COVID and a lot of that had to do again with the micro-bascular chair right and how the actual vascular system can be improved post-COVID. Wow okay I think I think my cold is taking up too much space in my brain for really I know this is a hard question today in case you got in case the audience hasn't heard the sniffling in the background here the two of us are fighting through probably we can be we might actually benefit from an NAD infusion the two of us make with a high dose of M&A just to simplify because I know it's like and I I talk and dive deep and then you come high overall I think NAD is a system to pay more attention to to balance NNMT and CD38 one M&A supports and balancing NNMT, Abigen and others support and balancing CD38 those naturally restore NAD and we can then occasionally pour more into the top of the bucket when we've blocked the things at the bottom. I love it I love it and so my take away from from our conversation so far is also if I'm going to be using NAD precursors and any NAD really one M&A has to be part of the equation like they're just it's it's it should be like peanut butter and jelly like what M&A needs to be part of that formula to really help to maintain some balance in the NMT one M&A. Yeah exactly that's that's kind of the story that I want to bring awareness to is if you're going to support your NAD system with precursors or with infusions make sure that you are also supporting the downstream metabolites by blocking the bad guys and you can do that through one M&A and then there's others on the other side. You know from a quantity perspective it seems to me like you don't need buckets of one M&A here like it's it's an interest it was interesting to me when I looked at the dosages I was like wow you know you would you would almost think whoa I'm going to need grams of this and it's actually not not the K although you know if we look at the dosage on the bottle and where we might want to go at certain times and maybe you want to talk about that a little bit like are there certain without being prescriptive you know neither of us is a doctor but without being prescriptive are there certain instances where people might need more M&A than they think would that show up in some ways in them that they might notice yeah I think so the bottle single capsule is 58 milligrams and that dose came out of some of the studies did show improvement in fatigue at 58 milligrams as sort of the baseline dose as we've started to use this more and we've gotten feedback from our practitioners and from from patients definitely need more when you're sicker and I mean they're safety testing done up to six grams but I think more in that 200 250 milligrams pulsed when you are at a deficit it's good yeah that's when we see people talk about the benefits more and those are going to be like the anecdotal things that we hear a lot are obviously fatigue brain fog anything that kind of it is just indicative of mitochondrial dysfunction yeah but other interesting ones that I've gotten is anywhere that you have a lot of mitochondria for example the eyes we've gotten a couple of people to tell us it's improved eyesight or it's helped with cataracts because of the amount of mitochondria in the retinas I got a question and this research hasn't been done it's I'm just hypothesizing but I got a question about fertility and also in menopause right where your ovaries are also hugely mitochondria dense so helping restore mitochondria function you can see improvements there as well yeah it'll be interesting when that research happens right I think that if you as you're talking about this the brain the heart the ovaries in men the testes kidneys like for chronic kidney disease these are all organs that are so critical and so dense in mitochondria it'll be so interesting to see over time as the research develops yeah yeah where our early days and starting to I think we got really a lot of research on any deep broadly because people started to realize it's important and just now we're starting to find the next layer of research in all the the balancing that's having to happen I love it now if someone wants to know whether their NAD is low what are the realistic or appropriate ways to assess that and does knowing truly matter yet yeah I like this question because I think you know I get this all the time well how can I measure how can I measure it I there are some groups that are starting to take a more intelligent approach to measuring NAD and NADH ratios and if they can get them intracellularly and I think we'll start to learn more right now a lot of it is at the research level even again this is a research level test but you can measure the cyclic ATP ribose which is a measurement of consumption of c to 38 so like we can start to get these interesting proxies but for the lay person that's not super helpful right now so the measurements that the biomarkers that you can get in general labs that are proxies to help us understand your NAD levels are going to be those ones tied to inflammation and tied to mitochondria function so the easy ones right like highly sensitive CRP almost cysteine is a good one because we just talked about with that methylation just to slow down if your homocysteine is high then there's a possibility that supporting an AD would be helpful in bringing that down exactly yep nilers yeah because if you have high homocysteine you likely have up regulation of NNMT which is consuming your NAD faster there you go okay so that would be a way to say okay you probably need to supplement with something to support your NAD and your and your one eminentech balance you'll have in tape yeah that's where like on the one eminase specifically we see improvements in homocysteine because of that direct blockage right that's where it's really the most like directly influenced but then because of the cd 38 side of it and some of these other enzymes just general inflammation markers that's where things like CRP would come in okay so you're measuring other markers to identify a depletion of an AD there's no actual do you think that is there an AD test out there is there anybody saying they can measure an AD we don't have to name names for what do you think of those tests I mean there's a there are people who are saying they can measure it a lot of the ones that previously I looked at are just like looking at serum levels with an AD which I think that's kind of there again serum levels of NAD plus because NAD plus is the more stable molecule easier to measure right there is a group that I've started talking more more with they're actually the conferences that we were just at that's a European group who has the first group I've talked to that's like we understand it we think all of this you know NAD hype is not representative of the full story and we're looking at NAD plus ratio with NADH intercellularly and wow that's what they say yeah it's it's currently available in like Germany and they're actively talking to a couple labs here in the states to see if they can get those labs to run the asses so yeah well and you know so the interesting and again the takeaway NAD NADH are in constant flux with each other so right I mean what would be really interesting in in a case like that is to do in real-time studies to see that ratio while you're getting an infusion yeah and you know what I mean like don't you think that would be so interesting because that would really give you insight in terms of how is the cell able to manage that dump right if you know yeah what happens right like yeah that's honestly would be if we can get this NAD NADH test even we can't get real-time it'd be cool to do it right before an infusion and like minutes after an infusion and then an hour after just to start to understand just to see how's the body managing this yeah how's the how's the cell able to manage I think that would be so interesting okay let's step away from supplements for a minute and let's talk about what is the high what are the highest ROI go to the entrepreneur brain what's the highest return on investment low-cast and free strategies for either preserving or recycling NAD naturally without relying only on supplements what should people be doing to support those NAD levels yeah I think that I love talking about supplements I know like that's our world but as someone who you know works and sells supplements I still always say that sleep and exercise are the most potent drugs you can take so I'll talk about why specifically for NAD even though it's a little bit like yeah obviously sleep and exercise so sleep what's really interesting when you start to go into like where sleep comes into this story is you have this enzyme we didn't even talk about this one but it's it's called NAMPT NAMPT and okay well we could talk about it now we have a few minutes but that's one I hope NAD recycling enzymes so it's what's helping in that salvage pathway and it's actually a clock controlled enzyme so it has you know circadian understanding and so when you sleep that enzyme is more regulated because you have better circadian functioning so you're actually when you you know are sleeping dysregulated your salvage of NAD is also dysregulated which is interesting that is very interesting but that's but you know that is a con that is one of the few concrete statements on depletion of cellular pathways related to sleep that I've ever heard anybody say on this podcast everybody talks about sleep it's so important blah blah blah but very rarely has someone said okay your NAMPT which is the salvage pathway enzyme if you're not sleeping it is not going to be able to do its job so you're not really going to be able to salvage your NAD which means you're going to wake up in the morning and part of the reason why you're so dead tired is you're you just never got to replenish your NAD to recycle it yeah I mean exactly and that kind of extends then into exercise two because another thing that regulates this NAMPT is resistance and over anaerobic training right so those stress signals are helping because a lot of it also has to get into like some you know the mild stressors right why paramedic stress is so good and that's part of this whole story that kind of weaves throughout all of it but that's the same idea idea with exercise you're regulating the salvage of your NAD more efficiently and so those two things together you can actually probably do 99% of what all of these supplements are so good but I feel with exercise it bears noting that when you tip over to the opposite side when you're over-training essentially what you're doing now is you're over-taxing a system that can't it just can't salvage it just can't replenish your it it can't keep up but 100% yep that's a bear what are the sides of that whereas signs of that I mean I think it's a great call out just like we can throw this whole redox system out of balance with taking too much of one of these precursors or NAD exercises this same thing right you're putting a redox stressor on the system and when you create too many reactive oxygen species with not enough time to recover in between which is what hard ongoing strenuous exercises are doing you're actively creating mild reactive oxygen species but then they become severe so what that will do is exactly the same thing and it will throw your redox balance off and your mitochondria won't be able to keep up and so you've kind of taxed the mitochondria versus made them more resilient and that's that a little bit but not too much of a good thing you want a williancy you don't want fatigue yeah well you know I'll all my poor husband I'm gonna throw him under the bus now he does these he's a swimmer and on Saturday mornings they have this workout that is insane and you can find him Saturday afternoon comatose on the couch like the man literally can't function and I'm sitting there going okay we need to give you some stuff I'm sorry we need to hold her tax the system it literally can't cope anymore y'all yeah that's why like I said they want stress and then too much of it or not enough of it is going to put you into a bad place so by basically it's not it's not even it's it's lifestyle it's lifestyle yeah but do you think lifestyle's enough as we're like for me right I'm now becoming post-to-child right I'm just turned 62 I'm like for me I don't know is sleep and exercise gonna be enough like managing my my stress my circadian rhythm which just went got shot to going across time zones like is it gonna be enough or am I it and I do feel that we get to an age where like you can maybe get away with all the lifestyle stuff in your 20s and your 30s to a point but once we've tipped over to the other side is it possible that we now need these supplements to a degree to keep us to hedge everything back into our favor yeah I think it's how I look at it is like there's the the sort of three core pillars of sleep exercise and diet which we can talk a little bit about diet and that too yeah um but just like we started this conversation with like we're in a post toxic or post covid world we're in a much more toxic world like it used probably and this is totally speculative maybe 80 a hundred years ago it didn't matter that you were 62 you could do all the lifestyle things and that would work but we're just up against so much more stressors in our current environment that are trying to age us faster so I do think you have to supplement and you're not gonna get everything right but caveat to that is you also can like cycle your supplements right you don't have to do everything all the time 100% um because that's a little bit of that stress on our system too right sometimes anybody has it sometimes it doesn't so you need that that variation because that's what builds resiliency so yes I do think you can't you have to have some supplementation as you get deeper into the world um to stay healthy yeah I agree I you know I I didn't experiment I'm not sure when this podcast will come out but I didn't experiment this summer it was kind of inadvertent but I kind of rebelled against myself and basically stopped taking 90% of my supplements I saw and I ran a metabolomics test in September and the doctor that I went through my results with and it'll come out in a podcast he was like holy crap not your NADs in the toilet your glutathione's depleted like you need to get back on the train which of course by the time I recorded the podcast with him I'd already come back on my stuff anyway but it was really interesting to me that it actually did show up in this test so this conversation around we don't need supplements we have we can get everything we need from good lifestyle and food it takes you so far I think to your point the world is different I also think our expectations as we age have changed right a person in their 60s one or two generations ago had very different expectations of how they work in a function in operating the world so so I you know and I'm not sitting here saying everybody needs to be on a 500 dollar month stack but I am saying that there are some foundational and this here we're talking about foundational nutrients to support cell repair and going back to something you said I think at the very beginning of the podcast and that is that if we can support the cell in producing energy the way that it needs to do it by either removing things or adding a few smart elements back in it will take care of a lot of things downstream and so there's other supplements you may not need that are just trying to bend aid a fundamental lack in cellular energy yep exactly that's that's really in like the whole how do you discern what's legit what's not legit those are the questions I asked myself at what level in the system is this working is it working at a top level middle or the root level and that helps you decide what to prioritize what's one longevity idea or technology that you believe deserves more attention from the mainstream that it currently gets we talked about an 80s all sort of leave that as one of my main ones I think I've also and I don't know if this is a good place to segue into it but I've gotten really fascinated with ketones as well and and I think it's a similar rationale because I've learned more about electron transport and how energy systems are you know how this this whole ATP as our currency and NAD as the transaction system converting all of these different inputs to ATP right and ketones is one of those so I have gotten much more into that science and research and I think ketones have been really talked about in the performance space for a long time yeah but I don't think they're getting talked about quite enough in the longevity space maybe in the keto diet way but not what high dose being in ketosis for you know high dose ketones can really do for cellular health yeah well I mean we've both been sipping on or this this episode was fueled by ketones and but you know I we don't I don't want to go too deep in the ketones to be only because we're running out of time but I do want I do think it bears mentioning there's ketone salts ketones esters different types of ketones out there you have one that quite apart from working really well and we'll talk about why it works well it actually tastes good which is a shocker in them itself because ketones have historically been one of those things where either you're getting this ketone salt which you know it has some good to it but doesn't it doesn't offer the full package or you had to block your nose and swallow something that just tastes like jet fuel pretty much um I think with kinetic you've you've solved that problem but very quickly let's give people a list of the benefits of ketones that go beyond performance because I think it has to do with the inflamed inflammatory pathways and energy systems as well you need so NADH is one of the inputs for electron transport FADH is another one ketones actually help skip a step of NADH converting into ATP so they're helping they're kind of coming in a step later um and supporting FADH into ATP and why that's really important is because it's giving your mitochondria some relief your mitochondria are actually not having to work quite as hard to make ATP so when you hear this idea like ketones are more efficient which because they're actually helping your mitochondria to not have to like go through every single step of the process to make ATP and in doing so you're letting your mitochondria recover a little bit or maybe for proper mitotgy to occur and so now you've created a more efficient system and then that leads into more of the inflammation benefits and other things like that kind of secondarily but I'll point out why again the cell is so smart and if we give it the right tools and the right fuel it can self correct and ketones are way to do that as well. You bring up an interesting point in that this is for someone who's not necessarily in ketosis exactly right and we're in a world where people are lacking the metabolic flexibility to ever get into ketosis and this would be a natural fuel that the body would have access to on a regular basis if we were metabolically flexible if we didn't eat every chance we got you know in a way I feel like it's bringing back a molecule access to a molecule that our bodies need would have historically had access to 100 percent exactly I mean metabolic flexibility is by definition your body's ability to be flexible in what fuel source it's using to fuel metabolism and we used to have to starve occasionally and we had ketones to be on board to do that and now it's it's hard to get people into a ketotic diet even myself for you know people who are healthy and oriented that way so why exogenous ketones are nice is because having any ketones on board is going to be helpful in improving metabolic flexibility you don't have to be you know above a one millibular or above a one point or whatever ratio that we're saying having some of that fuel source is going to be useful and you don't have to be in a ketotic diet state to do it okay and what and last question on the ketones is what is the difference between this ketone molecule and some of the other ones you'll find out on the market so I think the biggest thing to look at when you're looking at the ketones on the market is whether they have the actual BHB like beta hydroxybutyrie which is the ketone body or if they just have what's called one three butane dial which is the precursor so other things claim themselves to be ketones but they're actually just one three butane dial which is just telling your liver and to make its own ketones so ketone esters are one of each molecule bound by an ester bond so that's where that originally started from what we figured out with with our partners is how to make those two molecules free floating so you're getting BHB and one three butane dial they don't have the ester bond but the ester bond is often like is what causes the bad taste and some of the other challenges this tastes great I'm gonna put it out this tastes really good all right all right let's get back to this so when you look let's go back to nad science for a minute and so when you look ahead five to ten years what do you think is coming in the world of nad science that people aren't anticipating yet like what do you what's what's Courtney seeing down the road here I think the biggest one is we're gonna be like why were we all doing nad ivs all the time like it truly I mean we're starting to see it like there's little studies popping up here and they're causing you to have a question of hey maybe this is doing some harm yeah and I think ten years from now we're gonna be able to look back and say oh we actually did see that nad high doses of nad for certain populations caused increased you know risk of X or was bad for people with Y and just in general like maybe we're gonna find out that nad infusions were not the most effective compared to other things at replenishing our nad so that's my overall take I think we're gonna look back and be like wow uh one of the lectures that I hear is about radium I'm sure you've maybe heard this lecture before it's like how it gets started this is a quick quick sign nobody to make sense we used to use radium um oh yeah with the people glowing in the dust like yeah yeah yeah it was this elixir right and it actually a little bit of radium when you look at like radiation therapies and things like that um it's good but you actually then we started to say oh we need radium for everything and we put radium in our water and we put radium in our clothing and then we found out that it's actually not a good thing it's really bad yeah people would be glowing thinking they were really doing well and we were developing horrible cancers yeah no and and yeah so which brings me to the next one so the next question which is really you know it used to be biohacking now it's longevity like this is an industry where excitement often outpaces actual evidence so how do you balance innovation with scientific rigor because that excitement is part of innovation right so how do you balance the innovation and and the scientific rigor it's it is the challenge and I think what we have to continually ask ourselves is how are we pushing forward with the science we already know right and are we working against that or are we building upon that um and so I'm not cowboy enough to you know want to just really do something that I have no idea what's happening um yeah I appreciate those people I think that they do draw the science forward in both good and bad ways so to balance it I tend to lean on how do you do intelligent innovation or intentional innovation um we do have a lot of information AI is giving us even more access to information let's look at the foundations that we know and build upon it not ignore it and I think sometimes we ignore what we already know yeah I think that's great I also think what you said earlier about AI it's going to be about using AI intelligently and asking it the hard asking it to make to create the right filters for the answers that we're asking for because I I think I think AI overall in our industry is going to be a good thing it's going to allow us to connect dots that we wouldn't didn't even know existed uh but it's it's buyer beware like you got to be asking the right questions and pushing it to create the filters that we need to put in to avoid with something that's all hype without substance yeah yeah I encourage everyone I mean there's someone like that baked in you know you can tell your AI to answer every question in a certain way like go add that into your baseline for your AI always you know call out caveat or tell me when you're extrapolating um and then at least you're aware to make your own decisions love it all right when you imagine your future self decades from now what impact do you hope your work in longevity will have had you ask an all sorts of deep questions that no I know well that's what people want I mean people like I'm an A blah blah blah blah but what what what what's Courtney hoping to make what's your impact going to be or you hope yeah I love it um I truly have always kind of seen my role as helping to bring the science to reality um and that's probably a facet of sitting in these hats between you know doctor and businessman yeah and yeah also sort of an innate mediation mindset but what I would hope 10 years from now is that I brought people into a little bit more understandings that they can make more educated decisions for themselves like if you don't agree with what I have to say that's great at least hopefully you're asking more questions um and that's everything I try to bring into the world is just to help educate people to ask better questions to improve their own health love it love it all right what's one belief you hold about aging or metabolic health today that you suspect may evolve or be completely overturned in the future so is there something we're holding right now that you think yeah I don't think we quite have it right yet and we're getting the need some time to figure it out it's starting but one of the things that I think is inverting barely to start that I hope will continue to change is we I mean we're both biohackers but I think we're moving less into biohacking and more into sustainable lifestyle and yeah that's community right you're seeing the studies come out about what it means to have good friends we're losing community in a lot of ways that's having whole meals that we cook ourselves I think going a little bit back to the basics um without losing the innovations that have been helpful but that's what I hope we will look back and say hey you know we've got a ton of biohacking and innovation to raise awareness now let's go integrate that into what we've known for years of years I think that's a bit of a I think it's happening honestly I do people are really starting to happen and and part of that is people saying nervous system nervous system regulation well how do you regulate your nervous system a gadget might help but being around other people hugging a dog hugging a loved one like basic co-regulation like these are the things that really land um all right last question if you could offer your younger self who would have been 10 years yes one insight about ambition entrepreneurship and navigating complex scientific fields what would it be I think the biggest thing is having the confidence to give your opinion but then have it be broken I think that's a lot of you know as you grow up in this world especially with a lot of big opinions being yelled at you from every direction I mean you stand in the middle of it you talk to people on your podcast you have big opinions um and I think it's really easy to like me even five years ago when I really got back into this industry I was a lot more timid and like I don't have a big opinion yet I don't what can I proclaim out here in this industry with everybody else yelling about something and I think it's okay to say I don't know um and here's what I'm learning or to say this is what I do know and to really stand behind that um but then five years from now maybe research will break that so it's a little bit of like the balance of confidence and humility that is just a hard hard thing as you're around all these different people that are really smart with big ideas love it that's I like that the balance between confidence and humility is uh I think the world a lot of people in the world could use a bit more of that all right this Courtney Von Bussen where can people find you learn more we will have a link in the show notes folks and in that from that link you can get your hands on the M&A and the ketone product we're talking about there'll be a discount code in there the link is onerous to say the least so I can't read it out uh the code will be not 10 but in the meantime Courtney where can people find you and and and basically follow your learning journey where where can we how can we follow along here yeah so I mean you can follow me on instagram at cman bus the a n b us s or add me on linkedin um and then our the company that I helped spin out and and ran is called longevity launch labs and that is longevity launch.com um and that's where some of our our business the different businesses that you can kind of navigate to from there I'm amazing well thank you so much for today I feel like the two of us really battled through this one but I know my our calls on top of n80 systems is a little bit of a challenge yeah I'm gonna go take some more precursors and mna and pound my ketones for the rest. Hopefully we got another B.S. Corin fill out for everybody. I think we did you did a great job so thank you so much Courtney and it's been a pleasure and uh we will talk again soon I'm sure. Well thank you for having me that and I hope you feel better. Hey folks just a quick reminder that all of the information presented in this podcast is for information purposes only no medical advice no diagnosing no treatments suggested here before you try anything that you hear about or learn about here make sure that you check with your medical provider.